James's Weblog

LLF at General Synod: Pyrrhic victory lessons from women bishops

Mon, 13/11/2023 - 11:41 -- James Oakley
General Synod of the Church of England

The General Synod of the Church of England meets from today (13th November 2023) until Wednesday 15th. The November session doesn't happen every year (often General Synod only meets in February and July), and has partly been scheduled this year to give space to debate the next stages of Living in Love and Faith, and Prayers in Love and Faith.

Blog Category: 

Colours in Revelation

Thu, 19/10/2023 - 17:35 -- James Oakley

I assume colour is significant in the book of Revelation.

I was reading chapter 20, and realised that in Revelation 20:11 we have a "great white throne" and someone seated on it. This takes us back to Revelation 4:2, where we had a throne with someone seated on it. But this one is specifically white.

In this book we have

Blog Category: 

Handwritten sermon notes

Mon, 18/09/2023 - 14:05 -- James Oakley

What notes do you preach from?

It's a question young, aspiring preachers often ask of those who have been preaching for longer. That's because people want to know the "right" answer to that question. In particular, people often ask: Do you preach from a full script, or from notes?

No right answer

There is no right answer, because it will vary according to your personality, context, and the kind of talk or sermon you're delivering.

In every sermon, you're wanting to aim at two things.

Blog Category: 

How to: Set up MinIO with apache2 reverse proxy

Mon, 11/09/2023 - 17:20 -- James Oakley
MinIO Logo

"MinIO is a high-performance, S3 compatible object store." So says their homepage.

In brief, it's a self-hosted suite of tools to let you run your own storage server that is fully compatible with the Amazon S3 standards. They have a free version licenced under GNU ACPL v3, and a commercial supported version with their own licence.

Blog Category: 

Stephen Cottrell: Disagree as siblings not enemies?

Mon, 10/07/2023 - 19:47 -- James Oakley
Stephen Cottrell, Archbishop of York

In his presidential address to the July 2023 General Synod, Stephen Cottrell appealed to members of the Synod to debate and disagree not as enemies, but as siblings. On the face of it, this seems such an obvious and charitable standard to hold out, that it's hard to disagree with him. But we need to look more closely at what he's actually asking the Synod to do. This is not quite as smooth-running as it sounds.

Blog Category: 

Setting wallpaper in a script with KDE Plasma

Fri, 30/06/2023 - 10:51 -- James Oakley
Screenshot of the desktop on KDE Plasma

I'm currently running a computer that uses Fedora Linux, with the spin that comes with KDE Plasma as the desktop (I happen to prefer that to Gnome).

I wanted a script that will download a desktop wallpaper from the internet, and then set that to be my current wallpaper.

Blog Category: 

Pages

Subscribe to James's Weblog
Additional Terms